Introduction

Thanks to the IBM XPages for Bluemix runtime, Domino and XPages developers are able to create and publish their applications to the IBM Bluemix Cloud. This article provides quick facts about running XPages applications on the IBM Bluemix cloud. These facts are based on the latest releases of the IBM XPages runtime on Bluemix and XPages Extension Library as of 11th April 2016.

Quick Facts about running XPages on Bluemix

Positive

The XPages runtime on Bluemix was promoted from the experimental labs to the main catalog (Beta)

Integrate with 3rd party data stores on Bluemix such as DB2, Cloudant, etc.

Access Domino data hosted on-premises using NRPC connections

Authenticate users on Bluemix using an on-premises Domino address book via Directory Assistance

Use an existing server id that gets pushed to Bluemix via Domino Designer

Negative

The XPages NoSQL Database is still in experimental phase, forcing developers to keep data on-premises or use 3rd party data stores

The XPages Web Starter Boilerplate is still in experimental phase. This is due to the XPages NoSQL Database still being experimental

Not having a boilerplate potentially weakens the opportunity of outside/young developers adopting XPages

Because of the reliance of on-prem environments, the cost to adopt the Bluemix cloud is higher than running fully on-premises

The XPages runtime on Bluemix is still in beta, therefore no production deployments should be made to Bluemix

Many customers and software companies will not adopt XPages on Bluemix due to the reliance of the XPages Extension Library (i.e. ExtLib not supported by IBM)

Design must be separated from data (i.e. 2 NSFs) (Note: Separating design from data is a preferred practice in general, but one not adopted by most domino developers due to the architecture of a NSF design)

No Administrative access to the Domino server on Bluemix:

You can however view the program and data directory, but it's all read only